Ghosts of Spain: Travels Through a Country's Hidden Past

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The specific trigger for a reexamination of past events was the exhumation of bodies for reburial from first a handful, later scores, of mass graves dating from the Spanish Civil War. If, like me, the conundrums of modern spain by turn frustrate and delight you, then you must read this book. This book is between 350 and 400 pages, divided into thirteen chapters that seek to discuss one or another element of Spanish history and culture that strikes the author's unsystematic fancy. It took almost 30 years after Franco’s death, but suddenly, in the middle of the last decade, old wounds were reopened and old hostilities resurfaced as relatives of the dead began to demand exhumation, proper burial, and some measure of accountability. It was a top-selling history book in Spain in 2018 and has also been translated into Portuguese and Chinese.

Ghosts of Spain: Travels Through Spain and Its Silent Past Ghosts of Spain: Travels Through Spain and Its Silent Past

However, maybe this also reflects the diversity of Spain's regions, languages, and people that couldn't adequately be summed up in any other way. He examines flamenco, Basque and Catalan separatism, Spanish art and cinema, political corruption, gender relations, prostitution, tourism, and much more, as he attempts to pin down the quickly changing country.In 2010 he published a biography of Catherine of Aragon, the Spanish infanta who became Henry VIII's first wife, with Faber and Faber in London and Walker in New York. That was about when the last participants in that cataclysm were dying off and it became permissible to start dragging up the past.

Ghosts of Spain: Travels Through a Country’s Hidden Past

But repression and censorship expunged facts of death, torture and persecution, silenced memories and compounded suffering, long after Franco's death in 1975. Those seeking to rebury victims flung into ditches inhabit a different mental universe from those wanting to forget the whole bloody business.

Drawing on the author’s twenty years of experience living in Spain, Ghosts of Spain is a revelatory book about one of Europe’s most exciting countries. The dead play a prominent, almost overpowering, role in Spain, despite the country's growing self-image as a largely modern and progressive place.

Ghosts of Spain By Giles Tremlett | Used | 9780571279395 Ghosts of Spain By Giles Tremlett | Used | 9780571279395

Mortality, and, with it, a strong emotional tie to the past, has a peculiar resonance here that is found in few other European cultures. From Nobel Laureates Samuel Beckett and Harold Pinter to theatre greats Tom Stoppard and Alan Bennett to rising stars Polly Stenham and Florian Zeller, Faber Drama presents the very best theatre has to offer.It's also a fascinating look at the various regions of Spain, offering a glimpse into what constitutes the modern Spaniard. Partly, this is down to the leadership of Franco's chosen heir, King Juan Carlos, who threw his authority behind Spain's new democracy and undercut rightwing attempts to overthrow the government.